Relativity's Influence Is Still Going Strong on Its 100th Birthday

The outer limits of 21st-century physics involve arcane pursuits with strange and wonderful names like M-theory and de Sitter universes.
outer limit: ぎりぎりの限界、外側限界｛そとがわ げんかい｝
arcane: 秘密の、奥義の、不可解な、難解な
pursuit: 追跡、追撃、追求、続行、遂行、従事、する事、仕事、研究、趣味

Many of these endeavors rely heavily on Albert Einstein's explanation of how gravity emerges from the bending of space and time.
bending: bendの現在分詞。曲げる

With the assistance of the Office for Creative Research ( OCR ) , a New York City datavisualization firm, Scientific American decided to look for some measure of how often recent scientific papers in relevant areas of physics still lean on Einstein's 100-year-old achievement.
datavisualization: Null

OCR examined a year's worth of the physics literature for references to general relativity or its conceptual offshoots.
conceptual: 概念の
offshoot: 側枝、横枝、(氏族の)分かれ、分家、派生的な結果

Specifically, OCR processed 2,435 abstracts of 2014 physics papers from the arXiv.

org repository through a powerful text-analysis program incorporated into IBM's Watson AI system.

The software extracted keywords that turned up repeatedly in abstracts from a section of arXiv on general relativity and quantum cosmology.
quantum cosmology: 量子宇宙論; 量子宇宙

We then edited this list down to 61 keywords, each of which represents a research topic that has grown out of general relativity.
grow out: 〈grow out of...〉...から発生する；...から出来る；〈grow out〉育ちすぎる（＝outgrow）

The arXiv's relativity section was scanned to discover which of the 61 words were turning up most often in the research reports.
turn up: (…を)(上へ)折り返す、(…を)上に向ける、あおむけにする、返す、表を上にして置く、明るくする、音を大きくする、(…を)掘り起こす、発掘する、(…を)発見する

The data visualization here is the result.

Each incandescent colored dot stands for a paper that touches on at least one element of general relativity or its spin-offs see following three pages for details on how to interpret the visualization.
incandescent: 白熱の、白熱光を発する、光り輝く、きらめく
spin-offs: spin-offの複数形。物的分割

For an interactive version, go to www.

ScientificAmerican.

com/sep2015/relativity-infographic.

It is apparent at a glance that Einstein's ideas are still going strong.

Thousands of papers published every year make reference to his progeny.
progeny: 子孫、(人・動物の)子供たち

General relativity seems certain to continue to be a cornerstone of physics in decades to come.
certain to: 《be ～》きっと～する、～するに決まっている
cornerstone: 隅石(すみいし)、礎石、基礎、基本、肝要なもの、根本理念(など)

When we redo this data visualization 100 years from now, we are betting that it will yield the same pointillist explosion of color.
pointillist: 点描画家

\xa0Graphics by the Office for Creative Research \xa0DATA SOURCE: ARXIV.

ORG; Graphics by the Office for Creative Research

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